Lecture 'The Party at the End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse in the Inter-Crisis Period (Spain, 2008-2023)'
- For whom
- Alumni , Employees , Private individuals , Students
- When
- 28-04-2026 from 15:30 to 17:30
- Where
- Faculty board room – Campus Boekentoren, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent
- Language
- English
- Organizer
- Department of Literary Studies - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
- Contact
- jordi.serranomunoz@ugent.be
Natalia Castro Picón (Princeton University) will talk about the relationship between contemporary cultural production and disaster imagination.
In The Party at the End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse in the Inter-Crisis Period (Spain, 2008-2023) (Anagrama Prize 2025), Natalia Castro Picón argues that the current proliferation of apocalyptic images is a symptom of a profound disruption in the cultural codes that structure the world.
For her, the zero degree of the apocalyptic experience is not the end of history, but rather extreme disorientation. Consequently, its commonplaces, narrated through suggestive prophecies, consist of a repertoire of territorial catastrophes: earthquakes, floods, meteor showers, and so on. A
pocalyptic destruction offers a poetics that are fragmentary, chaotic, and incongruous, yet also disturbingly seductive,. In this presentation, we will discuss with the author how, over recent decades of overlapping crises and cycles of protest, different groups have contested the apocalyptic imagination as a fertile space from which to reorganize the social world.